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What if all of the county’s restaurants reopened their doors following a year-long pandemic that forced massive layoffs and hardly anyone showed up? To work.
It’s more than a hypothetical riddle.
As drinking and dining venues across San Diego County and the nation get the green light to more widely welcome back the customers they’ve been craving since COVID-19 first shut them down almost 14 months ago, they’ve been confronting a near-crisis labor shortage.
While it initially caught employers off guard, it shouldn’t be all that surprising.
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San Diego is experiencing something of a perfect storm as it transitions into life under increasingly relaxed reopening rules driven by rising vaccinations and diminishing infection rates. That, in turn, has unleashed a torrent of job openings not only for restaurants and bars, but also for hotels, casinos, theme parks and other service industries at a time when enhanced jobless benefits remain alluring.